Bengaluru: As the police continues to grill Mehdi Masroor Biswas, the alleged handler of the Islamic State Twitter account @shamiwitness, startling details are coming out.
Police have found that some 48 people were in constant touch with him and cops are trying to get their statement through email.
A senior police official said the CCB, who is probing the case, has found out that 48 people were in constant touch with Mehdi on the social networking site.
“Among the 17,700 followers of @shamiwitness, Mehdi was in constant touch with 48 people. Efforts are on to get their statements. However, we could get in touch with only 11 of them. We have asked them to give their statement through email or phone,” the official said.
Meanwhile, police is taking the help of Arabic language experts as most of Mehdi’s tweets are in Arabic. “We have consulted the language experts and they are helping us in understanding the Arabic tweets. Based on those tweets, Mehdi is being questioned in the presence of the experts,” the official said.
The investigation also revealed that Mehdi was in constant touch with three youths in Maharashtra, who were believed to have established contact with the Islamic State.
“We have asked the court to permit us take him to Maharashtra as part of investigation,” a police official said.
Bengaluru police commissioner M.N. Reddi said: “Twitter India has helped the police download the tweets of Mehdi Masroor Biswas. As they (the investigating team) have very little experience in analytics of tweets, they are getting a third party to provide them with software to analyse them.”
